Esther, the Butcher

“Surprising, absurd, comic, and utterly extraordinary . . . anything but a conventional novel.”—Jury of the Runeberg Prize (Finland) Already an international sensation, this brilliantly grotesque, hauntingly surreal, and instantly gripping literary debut features one of the most intense voices of recent fiction: a young woman whose love for animal butchery is matched only by her desire to have a baby All day, Esther slaughters. It’s the only job she’s ever done; it’s the only job she wants to do. For Esther, life is simple and beautiful. She has no dreams of leaving the place she was born, an industrial town dwarfed by a massive meat factory. As a baby, Esther was weaned on aspic and sausage, and as a teenager she loved nothing more than working at her parents’ butcher shop, digging her hand into a tub of freshly ground minced meat and imagining her own body as flesh that someone might one day touch as lovingly. As an adult, Esther’s life falls perfectly into place: she obtains her dream job in the Factory’s slaughterhouse, then snags a middle-class husband, an artificial inseminator of sows at the town’s pig farm.